More tee-hee vicar? Laughter runs riot at this religious farce

See How They Run (Royal Exchange, Manchester)

Manchester's Royal Exchange, not always the fullest theatre, has a cheery hit on its hands with a 65-year-old comedy.

See How They Run, which recently had a lucrative London revival, was written in World War II and is a drink-and-vicars farce with curates running round in their underwear and a bishop in his pyjamas. His Grace ends up in a gooseberry bush.

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But old-fashioned entertainment is exactly what See How They Run offers. There is nothing faddy or smart-alecked about it.

The packed audience at Wednesday's matinee (average age well over 60) threw itself into the melee, gurgling with pleasure as the household of the Rev Lionel Toop, incumbent of the rural parish of Merton-cum-Middlewick, disintegrated into a riot of inflagrante misunderstandings, brandied befuddlement and unexpected arrivals.

Toop is played to a highly mannered degree by Nick Caldecott, all fingers and eyebrows and - at times - almost hopping from mark to mark. This serves only to accentuate the show's fanciful flavour.

Kate O'Flynn, playing the Toops' maid, Ida, could do with speaking up for some of the Royal Exchange's older customers, but could never be accused of under-acting. She gets away with it, though.

Mrs Toop (Laura Rogers) gradually sinks beneath the frenzy, blanking out the lunatics who are chasing through her drawing room while she tries to conduct polite conversation with yet another vicar who has called at the house.

As with the best farces, there are moments when you want to gnaw your thumbs, so difficult does it become to watch unfolding disaster. The story acquires a mad logic of its own, to the point that we consider it perfectly natural that characters keep fainting with surprise.

Hugh Sacks does a lovely turn as a rotund parson and Alexandra Mathie is suitably Calvinist as the village dragon, Miss Skillon.

Toop pleads with his flighty wife: 'Can't you forget that you have been an actress and behave more as befits the niece of a Bishop?' She replies: 'And just how is that? The only other Bishop's niece I know is in the chorus of the Windmill.'

This, no doubt, earned a roar of mirth in 1944, but passes off in silence today. Fantasy has become reality. The only daughter of a bishop I know used to be a delightfully brassy, deep-voiced barmaid at El Vino.